1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to managing computer resources and more specifically to brokering access to resources in multiple compute resource environments, such as multiple private and/or public clouds.
2. Introduction
Cloud computing is described as a mechanism of providing scalable and virtualized compute resources over the Internet to the public or internally for a company, university, or other organization. Typically a computing cloud is made up of a group of individual computers connected by high-speed communications and some form of management software guiding the collective actions and usage of the individual computers. However, other cloud configurations exist. For example, FIG. 2 illustrates an example environment 200 in which a submitter 208 can choose from a number of clouds 202, 204, 206 to submit workload for processing. Currently, a number of vendors provide cloud computing services, including Google™, Amazon®, and Yahoo®. FIG. 2 shows cloud 1 202, cloud 2 204 and cloud 3 206. Typically these clouds are accessed via the Internet 210.
The infrastructure in a cloud is a data center with numerous servers typically with different levels of virtualization technologies. Access to each cloud is presented as a single point for the computing needs of customers. Often service level agreements (SLAs) with each cloud will exist which promise or guarantee a particular quality of service which can meet the requirements of a submitter 208.
Many advantages exist for cloud computing, including the ability of companies to avoid capital expenditures by only paying for consumed resources that they use. Some challenges also exist with the current state of cloud computing. One issue is with individual cloud vendors. Users may be limited to the service levels and applications or service providers that the cloud vendor 202, 204, 206 is willing to offer. Users may have limited ability to install applications and to perform certain tasks. Only particular operating environments may be available which do not match or have an affinity to a user's workload. In some cases, experts have argued that cloud computing is regression to the mechanism of mainframe computing prior to the 1970's.
Another feature of cloud computing is also shown in FIG. 2. In this example, assume that each submitter has its own cloud 212. This could be termed a private cloud which is an internal on-demand center for an entity such as a large company. Clouds 202, 204, 206 may be public clouds and companies such as IBM provide integration services to enable submitters 208 with private clouds 212 utilize a hybrid environment in which overflow workload transfers from a private cloud 212 to one of the public clouds 202, 204, 206. In this manner, a hybrid cloud can span both the corporate data centers and public services. However, a submitter 208 must identify and submit work to each cloud individually. This generally requires some kind of business relationship with one or more clouds, which can be cumbersome, expensive and administratively difficult for the owner of private cloud 210. The submitter 210 may use different cloud computing environments. The capability for this hybrid environment can be enabled by a combination of servers such as IBM's Blade Center HS22 Intel-based Blade Servers, the IBM Tivoli Service Management, monitoring and provisioning tools as well as VMware Virtualized Images and other software that can support specific workload types. Such hybrid environments, while enabling companies to run normal workloads in a private data center 212 and transmit overflow data and applications to public clouds, still suffer from some of the same issues set forth above.